The Beautiful Prisoner

Traditional criticism of Robbe-Grillet: Unfortunately, there is practically no plot. If only the storyline was directed toward some direction. The director pretends that there is something more to it, but there isn't. The storyline really doesn't go anywhere because it always circles back to the starting point - if we don't consider the cyclical nature of form, structure, and ultimately life as a cinematic goal in itself, then it will hardly be a goal for us as viewers. What is more important is that the storyline doesn't just pass through the film on its journey, but in the author's classic extreme intertextuality and intermediality, it passes through cinema, as well as painting and literature, and thus the film's diegesis finds meaning beyond its own horizons - without references to this cinematic world, the story of the revenant fiancé of Count Henri de Corinth will not make any sense at all. Almost every proper name and narrative fragment contains or is modeled as a reference to another work of art or another Robbe-Grillet creation. However, the lack of knowledge of these references doesn't matter at all since even with their knowledge, the story doesn't make any more sense because the aim of surrealism was never to reconstruct conventional meaning but to discover a different meaning... Could it be a mere coincidence of an anagram that the "onirie" dream structures of the protagonist's experience pass through irony, with which conventional forms of voice-over and flashback (postulating the reconstruction of past events) present the deconstruction of the character's space and time, from whose dream neither she herself nor the viewer wakes up? There is simply nothing to wake up from... (20/03/2022)